Charles "Harry" Heinlein salutes his fallen comrades in Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Europe, at the playing of taps at the American cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer.

Charles "Harry" Heinlein salutes his fallen comrades in Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Europe, at the playing of taps at the American cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer. (Sun photo by Doug Kapustin)

At the American cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, Harry Heinlein seeks out the grave of his former commander, Capt. Walter O. Schilling, who was killed before reaching the beach on D-Day."

At the American cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, Harry Heinlein seeks out the grave of his former commander, Capt. Walter O. Schilling, who was killed before reaching the beach on D-Day." (Sun photo by Doug Kapustin)

In his bunk aboard HMS Empire Javelin, Pvt. Charles "Harry" Heinlein felt gentle rocking as the vessel, packed with more than 1,200 American soldiers, awaited orders to leave Weymouth harbor for one of the greatest military adventures ever conceived. In the late afternoon on June 4, 1944, the West Baltimore native had no idea that out on the English Channel, one of the world's most capricious bodies of water, the waves were already so high, the forecast so gloomy, that Allied commanders were reconsidering their intention to launch a surprise invasion of Normandy, France, before the next sun rose.

By nightfall, the decision was made: The assault would be postponedanother day. Delay any longer and the Germans might get wise, get ready andset up a slaughter. But a pattern was set: D-Day would happen, just not asthe brass had planned.

The next day gave Heinlein time to think -- not necessarily a blessingfor a 22-year-old soldier trained to a razor's edge of readiness. Theprospect of leaving this friendly English harbor for points and adventuresunknown made him shudder.

As the hour of departure, 4:30 p.m., approached, he threw himself onhis bunk, fidgeted, played some cards. He was half a world away from home,even further in some ways. He had written 17-year-old Irene Orr, not tomention her mother and sisters, weeks ago, asking for a larger picture ofher, but had heard nothing. The little snapshot of her he'd carried in hispocket for so long was beginning to crumble.

Soon enough, the time came to address the things he could control. Hisgear -- two grenades, a quarter-pound of TNT, gas mask, brass knuckles attached to a knife, 51-pound machine-gun tripod -- needed packing; his .45 Colt pistol needed waterproofing. He knew that 28 months of training had readied him for anything the Germans could try. But to make it across the beach, up the bluffs and onward to French villages -- would the fighting be hand-to-hand?

There was no privacy here -- not with so many crammed below deck. Not far away, pals Winnie Wieskamp and Joe Walentowski , of Wisconsin and Michigan, prepared in the same way Joe did. After the long marches, the harmless brawling in town, the lukewarm beer in pubs -- these guys were his brothers now. Harry felt he was going to make it somehow, but would they?

Hundreds of landing craft and transport ships like the Javelin, bearing thousands of GIs, an epic invasion waiting to happen.

Just give us the word, Harry thought. A bayonet can't stay this sharp forever. Let's go.

The 'Great Crusade'

When the Javelin, a commercial trawler converted for military use, left the harbor and chugged toward the sea, it was one in a procession of vessels, an armada. They'd anchor in darkness, 11 miles from the Normandy coast, barely visible under a full moon. From that point, more than 1,000 members of Heinlein's 116th Infantry Regiment would pile into dozens of smaller landing craft for a wet and rugged ride to Omaha Beach.

At that latitude, it was light until after 10:30 p.m.; once darkness fell, so did a great silence. Like most of his buddies, Harry was not prone to reverie, but as the ship plunged across the English Channel, he fell into the sort of contemplation that could get you killed on the battlefield. Breakfast was offered, but he didn't eat. He fingered his life vest.

When static crackled through the P.A. system, he felt relief. A voice that had always comforted Harry as though it were his own father's boomed:

"You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you." As the recorded message from Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower ended with a brief, informal prayer, the frightened private from McKean Avenue felt a little reassured.

A false start

It was dark out, 4:30 in the morning, when he felt the shock. The boat to which Harry's unit was assigned hung over the sea, as a lifeboat might from an ocean liner; one by one, he and 30 other heavy-weapons men piled in. Pal Joe Walentowski, like Harry a machine-gunner, was there lugging his tripod; so was Lt. Verne Morse, his platoon leader since Fort Meade, a calm, stoic presence as boat commander. Harry's gear weighed 70-plus pounds, and once all the unit's mortars and machine guns were loaded, the British-made LCA (Landing Craft-Artillery) was lowered 30 feet to the water. It fell with a thud.

He knew the seas were rough, but now he could feel the frigid spray, and the waves were like moving hills. His feet started getting wet; soon he was ankle-deep in water. No one knew why -- maybe some fool had left the draining valve open -- but they were miles from shore in 54-degree seas, and their boat was going under.

They were still near enough to the Javelin to return and catch hold of the cargo netting on the side. One by one, lugging their gear up again, all 31 climbed to the deck. Walentowski's gunner lost a weapon in the drink. "What a start," Harry says.

Within half an hour, a replacement craft, a slightly larger LCVP (Landing Craft Vehicle-Personnel) would come by to pick them up, and they'd clamber back down again, one by one.

Two miles ... one mile'

The incongruity of floating for hours to make it to a killing ground was not lost on Harry, but first they had to get that far, and this didn't seem promising.

As it climbed the front of each wave, the flat-bottomed craft ascended to an almost vertical position, then sank like a plumb-bob down the back of the wave, only to start all over again. The Army had given out seasick pills and barf bags, and the other men were making generous use of the latter. The constant spray drenched them all.

Three walls enclosed them, but as the LCVP rose and fell, Harry could see a little bit over the ramp in front. Water, waves and foam -- that was it. At a speed of just over five knots, this was going to take three hours.

This second craft, a U.S. Navy model, was bigger than that British rig, but their gear was still so weighty it kept them well down in the 100-foot deep water. If it sank, it wouldn't take long to go under; two hours, maybe, of dog paddling in the cold water, and you'd be in a coma.

They traveled up and down more than forward, it seemed. For a battle-ready warrior, it was a lot of waiting. Harry felt for his .45, wondering what use it might be. Would he have to shoot Germans at close range?

Morse announced their location periodically -- "two miles" from shore, "one mile." Each time, Harry's gut tightened. Half a mile out, the battle of the century started to reach them.

The bluffs, those 100-foot battlements, came into view, looming high above the ramp. Explosives were going off in the distance. The whistle of a shell reached Harry's ears, the "whizz" of a bullet, the "ping" of another.

They were strangely tiny sounds, given the Armageddon that was to follow.

Omaha Beach

Eisenhower and the military brass had planned D-Day as meticulously as any operation in history.

Hitler, well dug in, had created a formidable defense of the Continent, the "Atlantic Wall." At obvious points of vulnerability -- such as Pas de Calais in France, just across from Dover, England -- his mines, barbed wire and fixed battlements made entry all but unthinkable.

Down on Normandy's Calvados coast, German Gen. Erwin Rommel, the "Desert Fox" famed for his exploits in North Africa, had littered the offshore waters with mines. Lethal 88 mm artillery and nests full of fast-firing MG 42 machine guns gave Germany's 352nd Division a clear shot, from multiple levels, at nearly every square inch of beach. Any sea crossing would be treacherous in itself, not only because of naval mines but also the threat of torpedo boats from Cherbourg and LeHavre.

Eisenhower saw the problems of Omaha Beach, the Yanks' code-name for that four-mile stretch of Calvados. But he liked the overall element of surprise that would characterize Operation Overlord, and good planning could reduce the dangers. If they arrived at low tide, just after dawn, Rommel's beach obstacles -- many of them topped with mines -- would be exposed, and Allied engineers could blow them up. So fast does the Norman tide rise that well-conditioned GIs would have a much smaller beach to cross within an hour, and pre-emptive aerial bombardment could pockmark the beach with craters for foxholes.

For all its problems, Ike thought, Omaha could be made to fit the plan.

It wasn't until 5 a.m. on June 6, 1944, that the Germans guessed that Omaha Beach was the invasion site. They looked out from the bluffs and saw an armada coming.

'Run like hell!'

Before the ramp of his LCVP ever opened -- before he saw a scene of carnage like something out of Dante's Inferno -- Harry had already lost many friends. Scores of "Stonewallers," men of the 116th he had trained with for 28 months, had been cut down -- torn up by shrapnel, riddled with bullets, drowned.

Calvados' notorious offshore cross-current was particularly strong as the invasion began, and it swept some landing craft more than a mile off-course. Some troops, such as the luckless Company A, landed directly in front of German strongholds. Those men saw an empty, quiet beach as they disembarked, only to be almost completely wiped out when machine-gunners suddenly opened fire.

Company D was also hit brutally. Harry wouldn't know it for days, but the man who had become his Army father, Capt. Walter O. Schilling, never set foot in the country he had trained his men to invade. When his landing craft was 400 yards from shore, an artillery round hit its ramp; the shrapnel killed the veteran guardsman instantly. Within the first three hours, some 350 members of the Stonewall Brigade were dead.

When Harry looks back, and tries to recall the details that followed the opening of his ramp, he realizes his memory is selective.

"When all hell is breaking loose around you," he says, "and all you can think of is survival, you don't have time to observe a lot. What was happening on the left and on the right? I'm not sure. I just remember when the ramp came down, me and Joe came out, and my shoes went through a little bit of water, and I hit the sand. I heard a voice saying, 'Run like hell!' Maybe it was in my mind, I don't know. But I started running like hell."

Harry was always a bit lucky, and lucky enough now. Most of the heavily laden boats carrying his buddies got stuck before reaching shore. Most GIs had to wade through waist- or chest-deep water, and some got cut down in the process. Harry's craft, though, did not just arrive a half-hour late, perhaps sparing his unit the butchery many Stonewallers met that first hour. It also had a higher ramp than the others, and that spared him the deluge. He ran through ankle-deep water and onto wet sand.

He saw corpses, lots of corpses, German bullets still pop-pop-popping them. He saw a buddy to his left ripped apart and flipped backward by bullets.

He felt the ground shaking from the enemy's 88 mm guns blasting round after round.

He heard naval shells, fired from the ships behind him, "whiffing" through the air as they sped over his head.

He looked for craters, the ones American bombers were supposed to have created for cover. Clouds, though, had screened the pilots' view. They'd delayed their bombing, and the sand was smooth as glass. He zigged left, zagged right, and kept running.

He felt his Army shoes flinging sand, felt the bulk of his pack, felt his chest heaving, and kept running. He heard men screaming, some in sheer terror, others in discernible words. "Get off the beach! Get off the beach!" many cried. Not all, he later learned, were officers. Some privates took command. He kept running.

Private Heinlein took cover behind a seawall about 150 yards from the bluff. He had made it halfway. He knelt, sucking wind; he doesn't recall for how long, maybe two minutes. He knew this was a place where the Germans would train their fire, so he couldn't crouch there all day. He drew a breath and bolted.

Weighed down and waterlogged, he fell, got up again, fell once more, and crossed a little flat. The next thing he knew, he was panting, hands on his knees, gazing up at a grassy bluff.

To his left, he saw the LeMoulins Draw, one of four natural ravines rainwater had created over the centuries, establishing paths from the bluff tops down to the beach. He started climbing the 40-degree slope, cutting side to side on his way up.

There was a lull in the shooting, and he kept pushing. In a span of roughly a half-hour, Harry Heinlein, 22, of Baltimore, Md., had propelled himself, or perhaps been carried, from the frigid waters of the English Channel through a combat zone historians will be describing for centuries, and stood at the summit that overlooked Omaha Beach.

Luck, training, faith

How much of it was training, how much of it luck, how much of it instinct, Harry Heinlein will never know. There was some of each, he is sure, and he doesn't think it hurt that he'd always placed his faith in God.

"I prayed regular over there," he says. "Talked to the chaplain when I was down or lost my way a bit. A lot goes wrong in war, and you don't know who's going to make it and who isn't. I always kept in mind that if my time was up, God would take me no matter what I did. If it wasn't, he wouldn't."

But one of the questions war always poses is "Why him, and why not me?" Harry confronted that puzzle for the first time a few hundred yards from the top of the bluff.

He saw a pasture in front of him. To his left was a hedgerow, one of the hedge-topped earthen banks that served as fences all over Normandy. To the right was a wooded area. No Germans were to be seen in either.

But from one -- he's not sure which -- came the crackle of gunfire.

A man cried out, a voice he knew. Joe Walentowski lay on the ground, blood soaking the pants of his uniform. "I'm hit! I'm hit!" he yelled. "Oh, I'm hit!"

Harry stood over his buddy. Everything seemed slowed down, far away.

"Are my legs still there?" Joe asked.

"Why, of course they are," Harry told him.

Why does he remember what he does about D-Day? The images he still has left -- are they the ones his mind had to cull to get him through? There's so much he didn't see, didn't hear, didn't have a clue about.

He doesn't remember trying to bandage Joe, but he did.

Bullets struck all around Walentowski, sending bursts of dirt in the air. An officer came from somewhere and started yelling. "Get moving, Private!" he ordered. "Get moving!"

It brings you down, he says, to see someone else get hit. When it's your friend, it goes straight to who you are. You're supposed to leave him there, as if all that time you spent together never happened, as if it doesn't matter to you whether he lives or dies?

Harry hoisted up his pack, drew his .45 and headed for the woods.

Editor's note: Baltimore-based historian Joseph Balkoski, author of Beyond the Beachhead: The 29th Division in Normandy (1989) and Omaha Beach (2004) offered research and historical background for these articles.